Time-awareness
The first step to using your time more efficiently is to analyze how you currently spend it. To find the answer, think about your activities during the day. What time did you wake up? How much time did you spend on early morning activities such as exercising, eating breakfast, cleaning, etc.? How much time did you spend on everything you did after that? Was the allotted time appropriate to the activity and work? Could you spend less time than that? Did you choose the right time to do that activity? Would it be better if you did that activity in the morning, at noon, at night, and at what time?
Think about what times you lost. Where were you late? What was the reason for your delay? Did you have to do activities that were not part of your plan? Was it necessary to do these activities, even at the cost of disrupting your schedule? What part of your planned activities did doing this activity eliminate? What new program did you plan to implement them? An excellent way to answer the above and similar questions are to get a notebook and record your daily activities. Remember to write down the time spent on each activity. Then, you will be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current program and plan based on your personal needs.
Your unique program
Despite some general principles for time planning, each person's life plan is usually unique. Due to different activities, people have other priorities and act at different speeds. For example, the schedule will be different for a housewife with a two-year-old child or a housewife with a teenage child, a working woman, a young student, a working man, an athlete, a writer, etc. People who are faster waste less time. Many people are busier and engage in many activities, while others have a limited variety of activities. For this reason, we must prepare a unique program for ourselves with a series of general principles. So, Modeling and copying other people's letters is not allowed.
Make a timeline for your goals
You can categorize your goals in two ways.
The first is based on how long it will take you to achieve your goals, which are divided into three categories.
Long-term goals that take a long time to achieve, such as becoming a university professor after graduating high school.
Goals that take less time to achieve, such as passing this year's exam.
In the third category, there are daily goals that take less time to accomplish, like today's homework.
As a first step, categorize your goals in this category and write down your long-term and short-term daily goals and their durations. It means how long you will take to reach that goal, one day, a year, or ten years.
The second stage involves categorizing goals based on their time requirements. Some goals require more time; for example, you need more time to read the whole of your biology book than a chapter. Plan your day, your week, your month, and your year. Next, consider your long-term goals and what you need to do to achieve them. How much progress should you have every year when doing these things?
How much every month? How much every week and every day? Record the result in your daily, monthly, and yearly schedule. In this way, you can see that you have to plan daily to reach your annual and long-term goals. Include the necessary components to achieve these goals in your daily schedule.
Choose the appropriate time for each activity.
A specific activity needs to be performed at a particular time of day or night. For example, you can't schedule your singing or music practice at night when most people are asleep. Regarding other activities, the issue is more sensitive and delicate.
Research shows, for instance, that certain hours of the day and night are optimal for studying, such as around 10 am and 2 midnight; the learning curve is very high in these two hours. In addition, the learning curve is at its lowest around 3 pm, so it is not a good time to study.
Therefore, it is essential to pay attention to the appropriateness of time. You can't do things that require more concentration when your children are awake And playing, or you can put your rest time in the time of other people's work and activities. Avoid wasting time. Often, we waste time little by little, without realizing it, but if we identify them, know what causes them, and take action to fix them, we will spend these times relaxing because rest has a particular time in our schedule. Waste of time usually occurs due to delay, slowness of action, impatience, lack of conditions to perform activities, etc.
Continue to follow your plan.
Our schedules are often disrupted by unexpected issues sometimes. Are you fully alert in such situations? Do you have any idea how to stop this annoying and disrupting agent of your program? Do you think it is more valuable than your other activities? Do you have to promise unsolicited activity? Resist if it is optional or the value of the new activity is not high, like inviting a friend to dinner that you can postpone for another day (how can we say no?). Otherwise, you can make a compensation plan and compensate for the problem at the first opportunity. For example, you can remove a little of your leisure time from the plans for the following days and spend it on an activity that you had to give up.